Two images will be remembered from Pope Francis' visit to the “Holy Land”.
One will be of the Pope pictured praying at Israel’s security barrier beneath a graffiti that compares Palestinian Arabs with Jews under the Nazis. “Bethlehem looks like the Warsaw Ghetto”, graffiti on the wall said.
If you were a “friend of the Jewish people”, as the Catholic media and some rabbis try to present you, you should have rejected the Judeophobic Palestinian propaganda.
The other will be the altar from which the Pope delivered his message in Bethlehem, facing a giant baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh, the very symbol of Palestinian anti-Semitic irredentism.
Papa Bergoglio delivered a message of hate to the Jews. How is that?
The Warsaw Ghetto was created by the Nazis as a means of collecting Jews in preparation for their extermination by Zyklon B. How can a Pope accept that it is compared to an Arab city under the Palestinian Authority’s rule?
The “Palestinian concentration camp” claim is a blatant anti-Semitic lie and an insult to the millions who really did suffer and die in the camps, and the Pope should have denounced it.
But it was clear in the homily delivered by Pope Francis in Bethlehem that he didn’t come to bring peace: “Are we like Mary and Joseph, who welcomed Jesus and cared for him with the love of a father and mother? Or are we like Herod, who wanted to eliminate him?”.
So according to Pope Francis, the Israeli Jews are like Herod, who killed all the innocent babies because his heart was set on killing Jesus.
This is an insidious form of anti-Semitism which subtly accuses the Jewish State of trying to murder the new Jesus, symbolized by the Palestinian Arabs.
Pope Francis should have asked the opinion of the nuns at the Rosary Sisters School in the Dachyat El Barid neighborhood north of Jerusalem. They asked to be included on the Israeli side of the fence, in light of requests from the Mother Superior of the Order. Why? They didn’t want to live under the Palestinian autocracy.
Why did the Pope meet with Palestinian Arab "refugees" if not to present the 1948 war as the source of an “injustice” committed by Israel when it pushed away the Palestinian Arabs?
Pope Francis, the refugee problem was created not by an inexorable eruption of hostilities, but by an Arab war of annihilation against Israel. You should have said that. Why did you ignore the 800,000 Jewish refugees who were driven out of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East in the years after Israel obtained its independence?
Why did Pope Francis accepted to walk in the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, with Mufti Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, who declared that “the Hour of Resurrection will not come until you fight the Jews”, who promoted terror against Israel and denied the existence of the Jewish Temples?
Talk is cheap, Pope Francis. If you were a “friend of the Jewish people”, as the Catholic media and some rabbis try to present you, you should have rejected the Judeophobic Palestinian propaganda; you should have refused to be pictured beneath images comparing Israel's actions to Hitler's and the Palestinian Arabs to Jesus; you should have refused to shake hands with the Muftis who want to annihilate the Jewish people.
After visiting the concentration camp of Mauthausen on June 25, 1988, Pope John Paul II said that the Jews “enriched the world by their suffering,” and their death was like the grain which must fall into the earth in order to bear fruit, in the words of Jesus who brings salvation.
One wonders whether being killed is the only role of the Jews in the eyes of the Papacy.
Now we have a new Pope who sees Israel as a baby-killer.
